The new show on view in the galleries at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, “Darker Shades of Red: Soviet Propaganda Art From the Cold War,” was in the pipeline for three years, but it couldn’t have arrived at a more pertinent moment.

Made up of 55 posters created from the mid-1940s through the 1990s in the bold graphic style of Social Realism, the exhibition is filled with images of heroic Soviet farmers, soldiers and industrial workers; Sputniks and rockets; caricatures of American leaders and other enemies of the state; and, perhaps most notably from our perspective, posters about preparing for a nuclear attack, and others glorifying the great leader.

“With what’s happening in our social and political arenas right now, it’s absolutely relevant,” says Lauren MacDonald, director of the St. Mary’s College Museum of Art. “There are posters about nuclear war, and here we are again.”

And those exalted images of Lenin, Stalin and Fidel Castro, she adds, were designed to feed “the cult of personality,” a phenomenon we’re now witnessing on these shores in living color.

The posters come from the private collection of Gary Hollingsworth, a Florida art conservator and collector whose passions run from Russian icons and American sheet music to underwater photography. In 2013, the St. Mary’s museum showed another of his traveling exhibitions, “Swords to Ploughshares,” which featured metal art crafted by soldiers in the trenches of World War I from artillery shells, shrapnel and other objects.

Hollingsworth bought these once-ubiquitous posters at flea markets in Moscow and St. Petersburg during trips to Russia after the Soviet Union went kaput in 1991.

The show serves the college’s educational purposes by highlighting “the importance of visual literacy, and making people aware of how propaganda images infiltrate every aspect of our lives,” MacDonald says. “It really illustrates how these posters shaped and directed mass consciousness.”

There’s a humorous touch to some of the state-sanctioned messaging, in the cartoon-style posters crafted in the ’70s by the Fighting Pencils, a group of countercultural graphic artists and poets who towed the Communist Party line by lampooning drunks and spoiled children.

It’s too late to see the first two films in the three-film retrospective of documentarian Steve James’ work at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael this month, but you can still catch the last one. “Hoop Dreams,” James’ classic 1994 film about two inner-city boys who aspire to play in the NBA, is scheduled to screen at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15.

Under the aegis of Living Jazz, the superior San Francisco singer Madeline Eastman, a daring improviser and a fine balladeer, is scheduled to perform a concert at a private home near the historic Claremont Hotel in Berkeley at 4 p.m. Feb. 25, accompanied by pianist Glen Pearson. Tickets are limited, and light refreshments come with them.

Kronos Festival 2018, the venerable string quartet’s fourth annual “hometown music” celebration set for April 16-28 at SFJazz Center, pairs the foursome with previous collaborators — among them tabla wizard Zakir Hussain, Vietnamese zither virtuoso Vân-Ánh Võ and the San Francisco Girls Chorus — as well as with new ones like Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi and Egyptian musician Islam Chipsy.

Chipsy helped create the vital Cairo music called electro chaabi, which the producers of Tunisian-French director Hind Meddeb’s 2013 documentary “Electro Chaabi” describe thusly: “Inspired by the down-and-dirty music played at street parties and weddings, this new populist dance form combines a punk spirit with a hip-hop attitude set against a furious cascade of drums, bass and electronic vocals.”

Kronos will also reunite with the Malian griots Trio Da Kali, with whom the quartet recorded the well-received 2017 album “Ladilikan,” and feature the “expansive sonic worlds” of multidisciplinary artist David Coulter.